Screen:

...Instead, the moments increase in which his explosions of rage have to alternate with the kind of impassivity he shows when he lets Joey beat on his face...

...La Motta's story is appealing as a modern Everyman play because he did a kind of work which allowed him to act out, physically, the character he possessed...

...He gets his own club in Miami and loses that too...

...Perhaps the sheer physicality of La Motta's story was what prompted De Niro to portray him by putting on sixty pounds...

...Before even the opening scene where Jake is rehearsing his night-club act, we catch a glimpse of him in the ring, all alone, as he warms up before a fight by doing a little shadowboxing...

...At the end of the movie, when it's time for him to go on stage at the night club, he concludes the warm-up he's been doing this time with a little more shadowboxing in front of the dressing-room mirror...

...As Scorsese sees him, the key to his character is his obduracy...

...Yet while everything has changed for him, nothing has changed...

...Done thus, the fight scenes become a kind of dream sequence...

...WESTERBECK, JR...

...In the movies, the hero of a fight film always has a character that develops slower than his body...

...No, the only fate Jake ever really has to struggle against is being Jake...

...Their film is the product of divided but not necessarily incompatible loyalties...

...It is the sort of flat, anti-dramatic, almost documentary narrative so typical of contemporary films and fiction...

...Jake doesn't change...

...What sets Raging Bull apart, however, is the way that Scorsese and Schrader play against the grain of these fight-film conventions which their own film invokes...

...The stoicism of this remark is a new-found wisdom for him, a radical transformation of his character...

...Jake wins the title, and then loses it...

...In the Dade County jail, after it has taken two guards to throw him into a cell on charges of serving minors at his night club, Jake pounds his head and fists against the stone walls so ferociously we fear he's going to knock himself out...

...He even loses the love and loyalty of his brother, and ends up a deadbeat comic in other people's sleazy clubs...

...The dive that La Motta once had to take was also set up by his own brother...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...It wasn't Joey or the Mob that ruined Jake, either...

...He'd done such a lousy job of taking the dive that the boxing commission investigated him...

...Joey advises him...

...It wasn't Vickie who ruined his life...

...This is what made him both a great fighter and a rather tragic person...

...They seem to be modeled on the sword fights in samurai movies, the slow-motion photography and special effects reducing the violence to the same sort of gory ritual it is in the Japanese films...

...Scorsese's film even suggests that La Motta himself is aware of such parallels between his life and the fighters in movies...

...In the fight where he takes a dive, the look of cocky defiance with which he provoked Joey turns to bored disdain for this palooka who can't hurt him even when he holds back...

...But as the film goes on, the, opening that he's looking for, the chance to strike back and score the knockout he wants, occurs less and less...

...Screen SHADOWBOXING A FIGHTER'S STANCE TOWARD LIFE The end of Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull is a continuation of the scene with which the film begins, one where the aging Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro) rehearses a nightclub act he does after retiring form the ring...

...They're aware of the many ways that La Motta's story follows the standard plot line of boxing classics like Body and Soul...

...I can't even deliver a boy from my own neighborhood...

...He moves in relentelessly in a low crouch, taking his beating, waiting for his chance to lash out at his opponent with his his trip-hammer barrage of lefts and rights...

...Scorsese and at least one of his scriptwriters, Paul Schrader, who also collaborated with him and De Niro on Taxi Driver, always work very much in the shadow of movie history...

...Because La Motta is seen this way by Scorsese, Schrader, and maybe even La Motta himself, whose memoir was the basis of the movie, Raging Bull ultimately becomes not an old-fashioned fight film, but a peculiarly modern story...

...He grows up...

...It is his own intractability, his inability to change, to learn from life the way the clean-cut kid played by John Garfield does...

...After Jake threw that fight, he and Joey wept bitterly in the dressing room...

...We see mat even here, at the height of the violence, La Motta was in the grip of an incredible self-involvement, boxing with shadows of his own creation...

...He gets rid of the floozies and tells off the gangster.'' Everybody dies," as John Garfield says to the fuming gangster for whom he has just refused to throw the title fight at the end of Body and Soul...

...Since his character was a given, a personality fully apparent from the first scene on, the increasing corpulence was at least a way to give visible form to the toll that character was taking...

...Like John Garfield in Robert Rossen's film, La Motta got mixed up with a dame and a gangster who both brought him grief...

...As much as Scorsese loves to draw upon the fantasies of old movies, he also wants to be true to Jake La Motta's story and to the reality of working-class life in the Italian communities of New York where Scorsese himself grew up...

...The truth is that he's spent his whole career boxing with shadows, faking himself out, throwing punches at his own paranoid delusions...

...That's what finally defeats Jake in the end...

...The material Jake rehearses in that opening and closing scene includes a monologue based on Brando's speech to his brother-"I coulda' been a contenda, Chahley"-in On the Waterfront...

...It's an embarrassment to me," the mobster explains to Joey...

...He marries a hot tomato named Vickie (Cathie Mortality), who drives him crazy and finally leaves him...

...Those fight scenes are the one place where Scorsese makes his own presence in La Motta's story felt.The fights are very stylized...

...him if he can (Robinson can't...

...In between these two rounds of self-sparring, everything that usually happens to the hero in a fight film happens to Jake...

...Why don'cha bust her hole an' t'row her out...

...In effect, Jake's stance as a fighter is his stance toward life...

...Jake isn't content until he's got the angered Joey bombarding him with right crosses...

...But in the end, his character does develop...

...Jake has to take that dive because no matter how many other contenders he beats, he can't get a title shot without doing the local don a favor...

...He changes dramatically...

...In one of the early scenes there is a moment when Jake asks his brother Joey (Joe Pesci) to hit him in the face, and then goads the brother until he does it, hard...

...There is even, when the flashbulbs go off on the press cameras, a dissonant sound like Japanese music on the otherwise silent track...

...She turned out to be a good wife and only left him after putting up with years of his suspicions that everybody from hoodlums to his own brother was sleeping with her...

...The weight De Niro put on acted out La Motta's fate in the same way that the scenes in the ring did...

...She's ruinin' ya life...

...The scene is like a variation on that old cliche of having the fighter's life pass before his eyes in flashback between the counts of nine and ten, and this isn't the only instance in which the film seems to rely on fight-film conventions...

...But he still got his title shot as the gangsters promised, and he won and lost the championship with no fix in...

...That's the point of the opening and closing shots where he is shadowboxing with himself...

...In the fight against Sugar Ray Robinson where he loses the middleweight title, Jake finally just stands against the ropes, defenseless, already beaten, and invites Robinson to K.O...